It was Saturday the 22nd of May, 2010 – but more importantly, it was the first ever WordCamp Malaysia, with a keynote speech from Automattic by Naoko McCracken (who gracefully celebrated her birthday with us) and guest appearances from Matt and Andy via pre-recorded video interviews conducted by Colin Charles during WordCamp San Fransisco.

To learn more about the event as a whole, and how we used pin-badges to promote our products, please visit our corporate blog and read the article ThePremiumPress, Badges and WordCamp Malaysia 2010.

Furthermore, as Terminal Junkie pointed-out:

This is the very first Wordcamp event to be held in Malaysia and I must commend the effectiveness of the organisers from start to finish. The whole event was on time and on schedule, something you don’t always see in a Malaysian’s event as they are infamous for their tardiness.

Let’s just say our expectations were by far surpassed and could not be happier for having helped-out by both sponsoring the event and giving a very brief presentation on Geo-Tagging with BuddyPress at WordCamp Malaysia 2010. In the spirit of OpenSource and sharing with the community, we wanted to provide as much reference as we could, so to start with, we’ve embedded our presentation (and will also include our presentation notes below it).

Introduction

Good morning everyone – I would first like to thank the organizing committee for the opportunity to participate in the first ever WordCamp Malaysia.

My name is Jimmy and I work with NI-Limits Sdn Bhd, the company behind ThePremiumPress, who are one of the sponsors here today. When my colleague Mark and I met with Simon for the first time over a month ago and started talking about our participation with the event, we were so excited and eager to learn what would be in store for the first WordCamp Malaysia. We listened very carefully, waiting patiently for a phrase that starts with a capital ‘B’, but sadly it never came!

When we realized that nobody was going to talk about BuddyPress, which for us at NI-Limits – is worse than the end of civilization as we know it, we also knew that we would have to do something about it.

We wanted so much for the WordPress community here in Malaysia to share our passion and enthusiasm about this awesome new Press extension. The platform that we, as a company who focuses and specializes in Press development, has learned to love and embrace for the past year.

So rather than sponsor a ten minute product pitch, we thought we’d mix subjects by merging BuddyPress, geo-tagging with WordPress and our crown-jewel, gMaps into a single presentation.

It’s somewhat technical and theoretical in places, and it assumes you already understand the basics behind BuddyPress and its role as a social-layer for WordPress – as the key focus for this presentation is on re-defining that social-layer…

BuddyPress as a Social-Layer for WordPress

So what is BuddyPress…?

BuddyPress was started as a pet project by Andy Peatling, a British chap like perhaps many of you here today, got involved with WordPress whilst freelancing.

Around March of 2008, both Andy and BuddyPress were acquired by Automattic, officially parking the project under the growing strength of the WordPress umbrella and providing it with the support and resources it needed to flourish.

Not just another plugin!

In a normal WordPress environment, whether for single-site or multi-site, the only interactions with the audiences are limited to posts, pages, comments and occasionally trackbacks.

Although this environment could in some ways be made more social with ad-hoc plugins that adds certain functions or features, there was no underlying platform or core system that brings everything together.

In this time where social-networking changes the way we live, work and play; there is a lack of a robust and highly customizable social-networking platforms.

NOT UNTIL BUDDYPRESS CAME ALONG!

In a nutshell, BuddyPress is an extension for WordPress that adds a social-networking layer on top of any existing WordPress powered sites, and as Michael Pratt recently pointed out in a presentation he made – although BuddyPress is officially a plugin, it’s not just another plugin – that’s for sure!

It basically takes all the goodies that you’ll experience from other social-network sites and packages it together so it can be easily download and installed, directly from WordPress at the click of a button.

Here’s a list of things that comes bundled with BuddyPress installs:

• Activity Streams
• Extended Profiles
• Groups
• Friends
• Messaging
• Forums

So seriously, if you haven’t already taken BuddyPress for a spin, you need to download it and test it out.

A little bit of recent news

In 2009, we’ve seen very exciting transformations and maturing of BuddyPress from its initial release of 1.0 until the latest release 1.2.

I’ve been working with BuddyPress in production environments since version 1.0, and believe me it was HARD. I often find myself spending weeks looking for workarounds and writing functions to override the problems found in the core scripts (occupational hazard in working with bleeding edge technologies I guess). I think I had my fair share of hair-pulling when it comes to forum integration and custom themes (without using the default layout).

However, when BuddyPress released 1.2, it was a huge improvement on the stability and the ease of customization. Creating customized themes has become extremely streamlined, and activating fully integrated forums is as simple as a single click of a button.

Currently we are all waiting anxiously for the 1.3 release, with its full support on WP3.0.

Why another social-networking platform…?

When we first heard about BuddyPress, we were wondering ourselves – why not just use Facebook?

We can always create a Facebook Fan Page and pull some news streams into the community website, or simply set-up a Twitter account and rely on that for branded conversations or social-support channels.

Here are just some of the reasons why we think BuddyPress has or will help to revolutionize the way we think about Social Networking Platforms & Services:

• Safeguard Sensitive & Proprietary Information

  Facebook’s biggest threat this year and hottest debated topic at the moment is privacy – basically the lack of it. You mix that and the Ning catastrophe, then owning and (or) at least controlling your own information suddenly becomes very appealing – something that is especially true in this growing social-world of connectivity and sharing. Because we need to ask ourselves, “do we really want other people to have complete control over our proprietary or sometimes sensitive information?”

• Re-Defining The Social-Layer

  Let’s first talk about niche communities.

  As powerful as a social-networking service (for example Facebook) can be, there’s always the limitation of how customizable the service is. The end result is that we focus more on how to make our services work on other people’s platform, rather than focusing on what works best for that particular community.

  With BuddyPress, you can create your very own, unique social-networking service over niche groups, tailored to the needs of each individual community.

  We’ve introduced BuddyPress as a social-layer for WordPress, but its true power comes from its ability to be redefined and used in new and creative ways.

  For example, using BuddyPress Extend Profiles, you can build groups of information to associate with users or members from a series of pre-defined fields – all of which can then be easily customized and used to develop your own unique sets of information.

  Another example will be using the .pot translations as a customization tool to re-label into community specific terms.

  By redefining this social-layer, through re-labeling things, styling the theme and setting up the correct profile fields; we can turn BuddyPress into a CRM, a Project Management Platform, an Auction Site, Corporate Intranet or even a Social-Media management system.

  So let’s use the transformation of BuddyPress into Foursquare as a theoretical example:

  • Add a “My Location” field to the extended profiles
  • Change the slugs (in bp-custom.php) for “members” into “travelers”
  • Change the slugs (in bp-custom.php) for “groups” into “venues”
  • Change WP permalink structure to /checkins/%postname%/
  • Use .pot functionality to replace “groups” with “venues”
  • Add geoRSS functionality to functions.php
  • Add a “Venue Location” field to new venues through BP hooks
  • Install Automattic’s geolocation plugin

  You’ve just built your own Foursquare, where posts are check-ins and new groups are classified as venues, where richer social-experiences can occur through threaded messaging and integrated forums – and that’s just for starters with a few simple steps…

• Easily Extensible

  BuddyPress is backed-up by Automattic and is just as extensible and easy to customize as WordPress. This allows us to easily redefine things by incorporating existing plugins such as:

  • BP Album – mimicking Facebook’s photo app on your own site:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-album/
  • Facestream & Tweetstream – Providing synchronization with Facebook, Twitter and BuddyPress:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facestream/ and
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetstream/
  • Geolocation – Geo-tag posts from website or mobile devices:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/geolocation/
  • Achievements – Reward users for contributions:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/achievements/ and
    http://buddypress.org/community/groups/achievements/

For more information regarding gMaps, please visit any of the following:

LIVE DEMO | PRODUCT PAGE | GROUP PAGE